A busy few days. It's time to prepare for the release of Jabberwocky.
Deb recorded the vocals for the B-Side, 'Humpty Dumpty's Whimsical Semantics', which is (unusually for any music single release) a play for two characters. This will be an unusual piece all round. The subject material is in the character of Humpty Dumpty as in Through the Looking-Glass, who is quite an ascerbic character - many of them are a bit negative. Here Humpty discusses the nature of English and the philosophy of language and how one word can mean anything because each of our vocabularies are unique to us, so any word can be swapped and mean the same thing, to us.
Musically this is a challenge because the material is highly cerebral rather than emotional. The music can't easily compliment the mood, because there isn't much of a mood, apart from the uppity and patronising tone of Humpty... so I've decided to be equally cerebral. I started with a simply 6-note theme, the notes 'BADEGG', and at the end, made an anagram of these in the same way that Humpty does with his words, thus musically illustrating the theme of the text.
After Deb's vocals (she plays both Humpty and Alice), we took some photographs for the Apocalypse of Clowns album. We have several good ones.
I'm also still singing daily, working through various exercises. This, if anything, is my new fad and passion. I started to do this with guitar at the start of July, and I regret not doing this years ago, yet, I didn't feel I knew what I was doing until now, I seem to see the path and what is needed. I've started to create some exercises for myself, generally different forms of scales and vowel sounds. I can see/hear what is needed, which are useful, where progress is made and where progress is slower. I will rewrite some of the Sisyphus songs to better use my range.
Next, I must finish with the Jabberwock model and the cover for the single. We also need to create a video for this 6-minute single soon, probably next week.
